[TriLUG] Any problems with a 160 GB IDE disk?

[Tom Bryan]

I have a Seagate 160 GB IDE disk.  I did some poking around on the Web, and I 
saw a lot of discussion over people who could only access the first 138 GB of 
a 160 GB disk.  

The IDE disk comes with a CD for setting up the disk under Windows and on a 
Mac.  From an initial look, I think that the CD essentiall has user manuals 
and a copy of "DiscWizard" which I'm guessing they ship to help partition the 
disk...not sure though.

It looks like the CD might be able to bootstrap itself into some sort of 
bootable DOS/Windows image on the CD, but that fails on my system because I 
have a SCSI CD-ROM drive.  I have a spare IDE CD-ROM, but this is starting to 
be silly.  I'm not sure what that CD could have on it that I can't already do 
with fdisk.

If I run fdisk and I see the following.  It looks like fdisk is seeing the 
whole disk.  Does anyone think that I'll get into trouble if I partition the 
disk with fdisk and just go with that?


Device contains neither a valid DOS partition table, nor Sun, SGI or OSF 
disklabel Building a new DOS disklabel. Changes will remain in memory only, 
until you decide to write them. After that, of course, the previous content 
won't be recoverable.

The number of cylinders for this disk is set to 19457.
There is nothing wrong with that, but this is larger than 1024,
and could in certain setups cause problems with:
1) software that runs at boot time (e.g., old versions of LILO)
2) booting and partitioning software from other OSs
   (e.g., DOS FDISK, OS/2 FDISK)
Warning: invalid flag 0x0000 of partition table 4 will be corrected by w(rite)

Command (m for help): p

Disk /dev/hdc: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

   Device Boot    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System

Command (m for help): q

---Tom